Much proletarian literature of the 1930s concerned itself with the pathetic plights of
working men. Depression-era historical documentation and popular culture are filled with
familiar images of male figures standing on bread lines, slouching over watery soup in
church basements, flagging down rides on desolate highways, or fighting policement or
scabs during strikes. While Genevieve Taggard's proletarian collection Calling Western
Union contains poems that honor working men and their difficulties, she pays
particular attention to women. Whether they are the wives of strking workers, alienated
members of the middle class, or laborers themselves, in Calling Western Union,
women's issues take center stage.

The poem "Mill Town" stands out from the majority of poems in Calling
Western Union that speak particularly about women's Depression-era experience. Rather
than presenting women in their middle class security as in "Middle-Age, Middle Class
Woman at Midnight" or "Interiors," or as they come to political
consciousness in "At Last the Women Are Marching" and "Feeding the
Children," "Mill Town" presents the bleak realities of laboring women.
Taggard introduces the poem with an epigraph from medical historian Paul de Kruif. His
book Why Keep Them Alive (1936), which appears to have inspired the poem's
composition, details the public health crisis the Depression created, particularly the
malnutrition and starvation of America's children.

Taggard begins the poem as an accompaniment to de Kruif's dispiriting scenario,
imagining the woman whose "womb is sick of its work with death."

.
. . then fold up without pause
The colored ginghams and the underclothes.
And
from the stale
Depth of the dresser, smelling of medicine, take
The first year's garments. And by this act prepare
Your store of pain, your weariness, dull love,
To bear another child with doubled fists
And sucking face...

"Mill Town" provides a gendered vocabulary of working class experience by
suggesting the double meaning of the word "labor." The woman of this "mill
town" experiences the excessive strains of wage-labor and that of repeated
childbirth. As the poem's opening lines explore domestic routine, the infant's tight rage
is a reminder of the tenuous grasp the Depression era mother has on the domestic milieu.

The poem's last seven lines show an ambiguous attitude toward the woman's poverty. What
we might construe as a scolding tone stands out in these last lines. It is unlikely,
however, that Taggard would intentionally reprimand the mill mother for her passivity. Her
sympathetic eye for working-class conditions as they affect women and children would
provide a more critically engaged treatment of her subject's circumstances. Since nowhere
else in Calling Western Union does Taggard take the male left to task for its
insensitivity to gender issues, it is unlikely that she means to appropriate its voice,
chiding the woman for not politicizing her position. Instead it appears that the speaker's
reproachful tone appropriates the voice of a hypocritical and judgmental social order,
which rebukes working class mothers who become pregnant repeatedly in an atmosphere of
economic want.

Clearly
it is best, mill mother,
Not to rebel or ask clear silly questions,
Saying womb is sick of its work with death,
Your body drugged with work and the repeated bitter
Gall of your morning vomit. Never try
Asking if we should blame you. Live in fear. And put
Soap on the yellowed blankets. Rub them pure.

In keeping with the poet's desire to portray the Depression-era woman who was not on
the barricades, one must notice the poem's negative representation of the female body.
Childbearing and mill work take serious tolls upon it. In childbirth it readies its
"store of pain". . . "weariness," and "dull love"; negative
too are the fruits of its labor. This "store of pain," one of Taggard's
most disturbing images, exposes the womb as complicit in life as death; the
"mill-mother" gives birth to children who then die of starvation. Thus the
female body "drugged with work," incapacitated by morning sickness, and later
the child-bed of unanesthetized home birth, also represents the isolation of those
women whose participation in the social struggle so important to the poet are eclipsed by
domestic burdens; of course inequalities of class and gender officiate these burdens--a
"womb sick of its work with death."

"Mill Town" presents perhaps the bleakest portrait of working-class life in Calling
Western Union. It also complicates Taggard's desire to create a sense of hope in her
readers, and to keep with the objectives of the proletarian literature of the period to
present the working class as progressive agents determined to usher in a new age and new
culture. Taggard never claims, as did socialist and feminist writer Crystal Eastman in the
early 1920s, that if and when capitalism fell, women would still be enslaved. Yet her
portrait of the captive mill-mother, however, placed alongside a variety of poems whose
themes are positive and optimistic, reveals the feminist poet's tensions between
representing difficult social realities and imagining a future that could transcend them.

What's first striking about "Mill Town" is its title. Since the
poem describes a mother and not a town, why isn't it called "Mill-Mother"? This
substitution of the word "Town" for the word "Mother" is significant
for several reasons.

First, the title's erasure of motherhood performs the denial of motherhood
that the poem describes. Motherhood in the poem cannot be realized. The mother's first
child died, and we anticipate a similar fate for the second; the second child is always
compared to the first, referred to only and always as "*another* child"
(emphasis added). We might think then of the title's denial of the word "Mother"
as participating in the poem's imagining of an unfulfilled motherhood.

Second, we might also think about the title's substitution of the
collective and public "Town" for the personal and private "Mother" as
participating in the poem's public representation of motherhood. The "Town" of
"Hill Town," like the poem itself, brings motherhood into the public realm.
Motherhood in "Hill Town" is very exposed. The first lines the poem, without any
hesitation, announce the most intimate details of the mother's life: her mourning and her
pregnancy. We then see the mother move from the public funeral to the public mill and back
to her house. But even at home she has no privacy and we watch her, in a very private
moment, putting away the clothes of her dead child. The poem's voice is also a very public
voice and this compounds her exposure. A public investigator announces the cause of the
child's death, and the announcement of the mother's pregnancy reads for me much like a
news report:

"...the child died, the investigator said, for lack of proper food.
After the funeral the mother went back to the mill. She is
expecting another child..."

The collective "we" of the speaker's voice adds to a sense of
the mother's exposure by creating an audience for the mother within the poem.

But what's most interesting about the public status of motherhood in this
poem is that there seems to be nothing appropriative or accusative in its publicity. The
mother's body remains her own--"Your body drugged with work and the repeated
bitter/Gall of your morning vomit" (lines 12-13)--and she is the poem's victim, not
its villain:

And by this act prepare
Your store of pain, your weariness, dull love,
To bear another child with doubled fists
And sucking face. (lines 5-8).

The publicizing of motherhood, then, does not seem to be an attempt to
make private failures public, but an attempt to contextualize and share these failings.
The poem implicates an economic structure, not the mother, for the death of the child.
Hard as she works (remember how she goes to the mill right after the funeral!), the mill
does not pay her enough to feed her children. The public performance of motherhood in
"Hill Town" thus refuses motherhood's insularity and disallows an accusation of
the mother than doesn't implicate the public.

Owing, then, to the speaker's sympathy for the mother and disavowal of her
insularity, I can hear little accusation in the speaker's final directives "Soap on
the yellowed blankets. Rub them pure" (line 15). Instead I read these directives not
as telling the mother how to absolve her own guilt, but as begging her to absolve the
public speaker of his. The publicizing of motherhood in "Hill Town," finally, is
quite interesting because it is neither appropriative nor oppressive, but instead rather
generous and sympathetic.